Thursday, January 16, 2014

The Value of Crowley

A reader posed a few questions last month in the
comments section of this post, and it prompted an interesting and somewhat lengthy
response from me. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but there was one piece
of it in particular that I thought I would pull out and make its own post. It
has to do with the question of why I spend my time explaining the works of Aleister
Crowley and Thelema, as
opposed to some other spiritual teacher or tradition that might equally be
useful to communicate what I’m trying to say without the baggage.

Here’s how the commenter phrased it:

What is valuable enough to you about Crowley's
perspective and the practices he developed that you think worth keeping despite
both his own shortcomings and the additional shortcomings of his followers?

This is a really good question, as it allows me to
reflect on the advantages of Aleister Crowley and his teachings specifically.

My answer to this part of the comment appears below the cut.

I suppose it’s too easy an answer just to say, as I
did above [in another part of the response], that my writing about Crowley is largely a matter of personal
interest and preference. I *do* certainly think that a person can learn
everything they need to learn about “attainment” without reading Crowley, and
in some senses it might be easier for them to avoid getting bogged down in all
the distractionary stuff that comes with Crowley.

So why bother with Crowley at all? Or, to put it
another way, what is there of value in Crowley over and beyond my personal
preference for his writings?

One of the primary things of value is the emphasis
he placed on the “method of science,” which, of course, doesn’t mean carefully
writing down what phase the moon was in when you did the LBRP tonight. Rather,
the “method of science” refers to attempting to view the world – and the Self –
as objectively as possible. Now, obviously, Crowley isn’t the only “spiritual
teacher” to express this idea, but he was the first, as far as I’m aware, to
connect the idea to our developing scientific understanding of the world, and
he turned to science, whenever possible, to furnish analogies for spiritual
experience.

In an age of flaky new age gurus who try lamely to
ride the coattails of quantum mechanics, it’s a breath of fresh air to see
Crowley make frequent comparisons to chemical reactions, astronomy, and many
other branches of science – not to argue that we have super powers but to
illustrate some very old spiritual concepts in often illuminating ways. I
mentioned above, in the very post you were commenting on, his use of the
chemical composition of air to make a point about the magical weapon attributed
to the element of air.

Another value that Crowley has – look out for your
irony meter! – is that he was very good at pointing out that most historical
spiritual traditions are loaded down with superstitious bullshit. Part of his
“mission,” as he conceived it, was to strip these systems down to their bare
essentials, to show that if we jettison the crap from the “spiritual”
traditions of the world, we can have for ourselves a practical, simple system
of initiation.

Look at Part I of Book IV as a classic example:
Crowley pared down the practice of meditation to something exceedingly simple,
something that a person could practice with scientific precision, tossing out
all of the nonsense with which people dress up the experience (including
especially ethical ideas associated with the practice and claims that people
like Jesus and Mohammed attached to Dhyana [“It was Jehovah!” or “It was
Gabriel!”]).

Look at the tables of 777, which reduce the gods
worshipped by mankind to a collection of symbols. Have a look at Liber Astarte,
which describes the function of religious worship – with the strong implication
that one god is ultimately as good as any other, that the experience is the
whole point (“First concerning the choice of a particular Deity. This matter is
of no import, sobeit that thou choose one suited to thine own highest nature.”)

Crowley’s writings are liberally sprinkled with
comments that make fun of the supernatural nonsense that people used to believe
in. It’s this attitude that led him to pick an explicitly “absurd” term for the
goal of his system (“Holy Guardian Angel”) so as to remind the student that
it’s just a label.

I was originally going to go through his writings
and give some examples, but this already way too long for a blog comment.
Suffice it to say that Crowley's writings contain many examples of him making
fun of supernaturalism, and anyone who seriously thinks the guy was anything
close to the new age space cadets running around claiming kinship with him now
needs to go back to the source material and read it more carefully.

And in part, that's what I'm doing on my blog:
facilitating readings of the source material, which is sorely neglected by most
of the people calling themselves Thelemites.

Anyway, Crowley is the only spiritual teacher, as
far as I’m aware, who explicitly tells his students, “I’m going to use this
term *because* it’s absurd, just to make sure you don’t get confused.”

Of course, most of his students get confused anyway.

It’s difficult to overstate the significance of
Crowley trying to identify something *useful* and *practical* in other systems,
underneath the ridiculous supernatural baggage that they come saddled with.
It’s of course deeply ironic that he himself was not immune to his own brand of
superstitious nonsense, but the central idea of his mission – that constant
quest for what is useful and practical underneath the wooly and ridiculous – is
one that ignited my imagination as a young man and that still possesses me to
find the “good” in any system (and to scoff at the rest).

Third, I think Crowley’s general emphasis on
skepticism is an immense boon to a student. In many ways, this is an extension
of my second point, but Crowley stressed skepticism not just toward supernatural
beliefs but toward the distorting influences of the mind: the emotions, the
thoughts, the self-image, the entire edifice of mental constructs that comprise
the illusion we call the self.

When combined with his emphasis on the “method of
science,” his comparisons to actual scientific inquiry, and his playful
blasphemy and tendency to scoff at supernatural claptrap, this skepticism
teaches students a truly useful frame of mind with which to approach the world
and claims in general.

It’s this skeptical frame of mind – one that is
never laid out so boldly in other spiritual teachers – that constitutes
Crowley’s real and lasting value as a teacher. He would have been the first one
to say that he doesn’t want people dully repeating him or doing and believing
things just because he said them. For goodness’ sake, the man joined a magical
order, broke with it, and started his own damn order. If it were actually
possible for Crowley to be born again in today’s day and age, do you really
think that he would sign up with one of these groups that calls themselves
A.’.A.’. and meekly work through the degrees?

Finally, I think Crowley’s works have a literary
value that makes them worth studying in and of themselves – far more so than
any other “spiritual teachers” throughout history. While his poetry was not
very good (though not terrible, either), his so-called Holy Books are
masterpieces that deserve to be studied as part of literary modernism, right
along with the works of Yeats and Joyce and other contemporaries. His prose,
too, is a pleasure to read and unpack: it is often densely packed with literary
allusion, religious imagery reinterpreted, obscure symbolism, wordplay, and a
great deal of wit and humor. There are very frequently profound nuggets to be
gleaned in much of the man’s prose, and while I may not always agree with what
Crowley says, I’m almost sure to enjoy how he says it.

I would study his works even if I didn’t have the
slightest interest in Thelema or attainment whatsoever, simply for the sheer pleasure
of engaging with his thoughts. This article that you’re commenting on is an
example of my unpacking his ideas so as to make him easier to read for others.
My goal is for someone unversed in Crowley to be able to read my article and
then go to the source material and find it less daunting.

For all of the above reasons, I say that Crowley
stands head and shoulders above any of the other supposed really great
spiritual teachers – R.G.T.s, as he puts in Magick Without Tears.